Midwesterners Throng to Talk UN Posted by David Shorr

Well maybe "throng" is an overstatement, but three days on the road with the State Department's Mark Lagon this week (modeling bipartisan civility) gave me some always-appreciated interchange with citizens in Madison, Milwaukee, and Chicago. Many thanks to the good people of Americans for Informed Democracy for arranging the tour, especially our local hosts on the five campuses we visited.

Mark and I are on a shared mission to re-frame the UN debate to make it harder for people to blame the UN for the failures of member states -- or to expect it to work miracles. We talked with Midwesterners about some of the recurring (unhelpful) themes of any discussion of this topic: the quest for structural fixes, blame-the-UN-firsters, and the domestication of the good-works-doing UN (that last one's more my thing than Mark's).

The issue of giving the Security Council a makeover is a distraction. I'm all for changing the composition of the Security Council to reflect 21st Century, as opposed to post-WWII realities. But the rules for who serves, and votes, on decision-making bodies are always the exact thing that is hardest to change.

Meanwhile, we're not focusing on the real issue: what decisions are (or aren't) being made about real-world problems. The anachronistic make-up of the Security Council is not itself preventing the world's nations from cooperating more effectively. The United Nations will (or won't) do whatever its member states want it to. We can discuss countries' diplomatic positions and how they stand in the way of progress on a given issue. In fact, that would be a welcome break from the endless back-and-forthing about the size, composition, and voting rules for this or that UN body -- which is the point.

And so we have a debate on the UN that always highlights the UN's machinery and forgets who is really running things. This has become a widespread and ingrained reflex, and like a reflex, it is often unconscious. "The UN" is often the scapegoat for international inaction, which is very convenient for member states. As if to prove the point, the weekend before Mark and my concert tour, the New York Times, in an otherwise excellent editorial on Darfur, charged that the UN had "disgraced itself." The rest of the piece assigns blame with greater precision, but sweeping condemnations of "the UN" should always prompt us to ask what UN member nations are up to.

Another point that Mark and I heard is that we don't hear enough about the UN's success stories -- the good humanitarian work it does around the world. At one level, the efforts of the UN's specialized agencies (UNICEF, UNHCR) is a reminder that people rather than governments must be the ultimate beneficiaries of the UN. On the other hand, it will be a sad (and violent, impoverished...) world if all we asked of the UN is such technical work. It would be all band-aids and no treatment for the underlying pathology, and world leaders would be off the hook for the hard political work, just as they often already are.

Comments

[Zathras]

I ordinarily hold no briefs for the New York Times editorial page, but the March 31 Darfur editorial was pretty clear that the UN "disgracing itself" was a product of the Secretary General and his representatives allowing themselves to be taken in by the two-faced Sudanese government, as well as the Human Rights Council's reluctance to bring any pressure on Khartoum.

It was a fair indictment. If the UN as an institution shouldn't be held responsible for everything its members refuse to do, the reverse is also true -- fear of upsetting UN member states, including those complicit in genocide, can't excuse passivity on the part of UN officials in the face of the very worst kind of human rights violation there is.

[Keith Porter]

In spirit I agree with everything my colleague David Shorr has written here. I am a big believer in doing away with all "UN Fails to..." headlines in exchange for headlines which tell us exactly which countries "failed" to endorse action.

But I always think it a little unseemly when Americans downplay the significance of Security Council reform. Sitting there with a veto, and the full knowledge that we will have a priviliged position in whatever comes next (or we will take our marbles and go home) it feels a little arrogant to dismiss reform merely because it has proven to be difficult.

David writes, "The issue of giving the Security Council a makeover is a distraction. I'm all for changing the composition of the Security Council to reflect 21st Century, as opposed to post-WWII realities. But the rules for who serves, and votes, on decision-making bodies are always the exact thing that is hardest to change."

Hard? Yes. A distraction? Perhaps. But only until it erupts into a crisis. The rest of the world has raised serious questions about the legitimacy of the council for almost 20 years. And not a single concrete action has been taken to address those questions. Legitimacy is not something which can be mandated, it must be earned. And the pendulum is swinging in the wrong direction for the council. Wouldn't it better to find the political will to act now, before a crisis, rather than dismissing the problem as a distraction?

David writes, "The anachronistic make-up of the Security Council is not itself preventing the world's nations from cooperating more effectively." I agree. And there is no guarantee that a different grouping of nations would prove any less able to dodge the big issues of our time. But if the make-up of an institution is "anachronistic," how long until the institution itself becomes an anachronism?

[Don Bacon]

The "big issues of our time" are the business of the one superpower in the world which should brook no interference with its fiats. This is what makes the United Nations an "anachronism" to those Americans who believe the US is "The City on the Hill" and a pillar of "exemplarism".

So the UN is the Rodney Dangerfield of our world society. It gets no respect. President Ahmadinejad says it is the stooge of the United States and President Bush chastises Senator Kerry for suggesting that the US needs a Security Council vote before acting in its own interest and starting a war. In a world of American hegemony, with its powerful advocates in both US political parties, there is no place for ankle-biters especially from--ugh!--France, which is one reason that Rumsfeld turned to NATO to do the Pentagon's war-fighting in SW Asia.

Time was that the UN did the US's bidding, and it still does with Iran, but it can't be counted on particularly if the Security Council is expanded to reflect the realities of a multi-polar world. And the US government cannot be collegial. It can't cooperate--it must rule. Other organizations are stepping up-- The Arab League, The Islamic Conference, the Non-aligned Movement, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The SCO is a permanent intergovernmental international organisation proclaimed in Shanghai on June 15, 2001 by six countries - China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Mongolia, Iran, India and Pakistan, which previously had observer status, will become full members.

So here we have the powerful US with NATO under its control being countered by all these other organizations which are gaining strength, and the UN fighting for survival. What a difference from when I grew up (in the fifties) and the school was filled with blue flags (I exaggerate a little) and the UN was the hope of the future. Now we see "US out of the UN" signs in the desert and disdain for the UN in Washington.

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